- cross-posted to:
- desantisthreatensusa@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- desantisthreatensusa@lemmy.world
Board of education replaces course at 12 public universities with own US history curriculum, in latest ‘anti-woke’ attack
Educators are warning that college enrollment in Florida will plummet after the state removed sociology as a core class from campuses in the latest round of Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke ideology”.
The Republican governor’s hand-picked board of education voted on Wednesday to replace the established course on the principles of sociology at its 12 public universities with its own US history curriculum, incorporating an “historically accurate account of America’s founding [and] the horrors of slavery”.
The board faced a backlash last summer for requiring public schools to teach that forced labor was beneficial to enslaved Black people because it taught them useful skills.
The removal as a required core course of sociology classes, which Florida education commissioner and staunch DeSantis acolyte Manny Díaz insisted without evidence had “been hijacked by leftwing activists”, follows several other recent “anti-woke” moves in education in Florida.
The quality of an overall department and the quality of classes taken by non-majors to fulfill degree requirements are two different things. For example, my university has a great architecture school, but that didn’t stop the “history of industrial design” class I took to fulfill my art requirement (as an engineering major) from being mostly an exercise in memorizing pictures of chairs.